Brandon Gill Simulator
Gameplay screenshot
Brandon Gill was first brought to my attention in early 2025 with the headline, “House Republican fundraises with petition to deport Ilhan Omar”. Ilhan Omar is a congresswoman who is a legal United States citizen and Somali refugee with left-wing politics, which was all Gill needed to call for her exile. Despite the increasing number of depraved marks by Republican politicians over the past years, this in particular stuck with me and made me furious. This was due in no small part to the fact that he is the representative for the 26th Congressional District of Texas, only a short drive from my family home. Looking further into Brandon revealed that this vitriolic attack was no anomaly; he has a track record of promoting conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and doing anything for a modicum of attention. When I come across a politician this comically corrupt and hateful, I cannot help but wonder, what choices led them to this point in their life? Where did it all go so wrong?
Brandon Gill’s background
Brandon Gill’s family has a history of getting involved in politics. His dad, Russ Gill, was an Air Force veteran turned Delta Airlines pilot and ran an unsuccessful bid for Congress in the 2004 midterms, when Brandon was only nine years old. Brandon, his parents (Russell and Judi), and his younger brother Taylor grew up on ‘a cattle ranch’ near Eula, Texas, not too far from where I grew up.
It’s important to clarify the culture of cattle ranching in Texas. Rich Texans like Brandon’s dad will often buy ranching land as a form of investment and put a few cow on it so that they can cosplay as a rancher a few weekends out of the year. They will often hire ranch hands to do all of the actual work on the land, and if they’re lucky, break even by selling the cattle after a few years. All my research points to the likelihood that Brandon had a comfortable upbringing, and his family would use the ranch for leisure and not hard labor like he would lead you to believe in his biography blurbs.
Brandon attended Dartmouth, where he met his soon to be wife Danielle D’Souza, who is the daughter of Dinesh D’Souza. Dinesh is a high-powered and influential far-right conservative who is behind some of the most vile pieces of divisive media in the past few decades. This includes pushing for rollbacks of civil rights protections and spouting slavery apologist rhetoric, conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party, and lies about the 2020 US presidential election being stolen. However, he himself is an Indian immigrant married to a Venezuelan immigrant. He has been accused of beating his ex-wife and is a registered felon due to campaign finance fraud. He is basically everything that he publicly fear-mongers about - a violent felon immigrant who commits campaign fraud. Despite that, however, his vitriolic right-wing media empire has amassed powerful allies. His wedding was officiated by Ted Cruz, and his felony charge was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2018.
Therefore, when Brandon Gill, president of the conservative editorial The Dartmouth Review, married the daughter of the man who was one of the first writers of the publication (his ‘journalism’ included outing gay students and interviewing KKK members), Brandon Gill had a path forward to political relevancy. While working as an investment banker in New York City, he followed the same tactics that his father-in-law had used for decades: stoke tensions and generate controversy, regardless of consequences or truth. He founded the hyper-partisan online ‘newspaper’ D.C. Enquirer with his wife and father-in-law in 2022. For the articles, he paid a UT-Austin intern to write hundreds of poorly-researched, inflammatory articles that consistently praised Donald Trump. Again, using the tactics of his father-in-law, he set up multiple shell Facebook pages to aggressively repost these links and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to run deceptive ads to artificially boost the clicks on these pages.
Screenshot of multiple Facebook pages posting the same link. Screenshot by Popular Info.
The result was that he was getting many eyeballs, and fast. His far-right articles were shared many times by Donald Trump over 150 times, and the millions of hits gave Brandon Gill a platform to rival Dinesh D’Souza. Finally, his chance came in November 2023, when Representative Michael C. Burgess announced his intention to retire after twenty years in office. Very coincidentally, Gill had moved to the same district only less than a year earlier. A week later, he launched his campaign across his social media, receiving an online endorsement from Trump before the end of the year.
Trumps endorsement
His political connections paid off, and Brandon Gill won the Republican primary and eventually the congressional seat, with over 1 million dollars of political contributions. Once he entered Congress, Brandon Gill wiped the D.C. Enquirer from the internet and started trying out new ways of getting attention. His strategy appears to be ‘clip-farming’: both on the floor of the House of Representatives and on talk shows, voicing divisive and witty statements live and posting clips of his rants on social media, hoping they will go viral. It’s a surreal experience to watch a congressman speak live on C-SPAN, performing for a future online audience that he hopes will see spliced versions of his speech on their Facebook and X feeds, all for the possibility of gaining a bit more political relevance. Of course, his grift also extends to insider trading, and in his first year in Congress, he violated the federal STOCK Act by improperly disclosing up to half a million dollars in Bitcoin purchases. According to OpenSecrets:
The lawmaker’s Feb. 27 purchase came after a weeks-long slide in Bitcoin prices — and a week before Trump announced the creation of a “strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile” to make the United States “a leader among nations in government digital asset strategy.” Bitcoin traded at around $85,000 per coin on Feb. 27.
It was trading at above $104,000 early Monday afternoon.
From the unfortunate number of hours I had spent looking at the life of this man, I was struck by just how laughable it all was. Brandon Gill, his wife, and father-in-law have long treated politics as a game with consequences that they personally are exempt from. They lazily hide their greed, they hardly try to cover up lies, and they have a track record that shows they can bury their opponents through sheer amounts of misinformation. Well, if Brandon Gill wanted to treat politics like a game, I wanted to make it into one for him.
The Game
I was inspired by online clicker games where the goal is to simply accumulate more of something, even though it didn’t really make much sense. Clicker games have been especially top of mind for me since watching my friend make Clickipedia (a Wikipedia clicker game) at a Wikipedia game jam. I thought this fit the vibe of Brandon Gill and the D’Souzas insatiable thirst for money and power.
Cookie clicker screenshot
However, I also wanted this game to have a touch of legitimacy, so I used a few sources of real-world data to augment the game. As mentioned above, the DC Enquirer website is now defunct, but I was able to find a list of all the URLs archived by archive.org (Trump is mentioned 2,693 times) and extract the rough headlines from there. A better option would have been scraping the URLs from the DC Enquirer’s Twitter or Facebook feed, but I didn’t have the API credentials to do that.
In addition, I downloaded a CSV of all Brandon Gill’s personal and corporate donations (often the line is blurry) from the FEC. When you play the game, you can see the real headlines his news company published and the real donations that he received during his congressional campaign.
Screenshot of the action on the website where you can see real headlines and donations
Due to the looming project deadline for this website, I did not spend a lot of time writing the prologue and epilogue. I want to clean it up to ensure the motivations and morals of the main protagonist are clear. Instead, I spent most of the time fine-tuning the ‘click’ animation to make it as satisfying as possible.
Click animation minus the sound effects
Reception
Some common feedback from my classmates included
- They liked the duration of the game, and the goal of one billion dollars felt achievable without getting bored.
- They wanted more background on who this guy was and why he was so villainous.
- The upgrade options were not very balanced. E.g., insider trading was incredibly overpowered compared to buying Facebook ads.
- They were unclear about what the donations and headlines were popping up on screen, and only understood they were real-world artifacts when I explained it.
Overall, I learned a lot making this game, and I am happy with this first version. However, I have still fallen short of my goal of educating the public - especially Texas voters - about Brandon Gill. My hope is that I could potentially make this game engaging enough to be picked up by a local news station or to be seen and talked about by Brandon Gill himself. Until that happens, it will be hard to officially declare this project a success.